Caroline Berg Eriksen
One of the most known bloggers in Norway is Caroline Berg Eriksen who writes the blogg Fotballfrue. On her blog you can read a lot about exercise and her low carb lifestyle. Due to the massive blog success and smooth running business Treasures, Caroline is able to live a fairly comfortable life with her husband. It doesn’t make things worse by the fact that he happens to be a football player either. She is in other words a Norwegian type of WAG. Once that has been said, compared to many other WAGs living the sweet life on their man’s paycheck, she has indeed made a name for herself and been successfull in the things she’s doing.
With such success comes a lot of responsibility. The blog, Fotballfrue, has a great number of readers and Bloglovin shows an amazing 13,081 followers. Many of the readers are said to be young girls looking up to this pretty, slim and privileged woman, so the responsibility that falls on Caroline would be to to stand as a good role model for these girls.
As all well-known bloggers, Caroline has experienced a lot of harsh critique, mostly rooted in body image and health. Especially one blog entry has created a huge amount of publicity for the young woman, in where she is showing off her bikini body. The entry has received 850 comments and is a mixture of critique and positive feedback. One comment reads «You have got to have a problem, that is not the body of a healthy person... You need help Caroline!» Nutritionist Tine Sundfør has openly shown how critical she is to the blog entry; “She is abusing her position and creates hysteria in terms of fitness, diet and food” a direct quote from the Nutritionist who believes that the images in the worst case can encourage anorexia.
This storm happened last Summer, so it’s not something new and exciting. The reason I decided to write about it now however, was due to the fact I just came across an article about Mrs Eriksen having been chosen to promote Bikinis for Porto Br. Someone has put fuel on the fire, and the endless battle of whether she’s a bad role model or not goes on, something both Caroline Berg Eriksen and Porto Br are fully aware of. This has been a very smart move really from the company’s side, the amount of free PR they will receive because of this, and I highly doubt that those who decides to bad-mouth her will affect the sales numbers much. The faithful young girls reading her blog (and doesn’t really know better anyway) will love and buy.
The question still remains tho; Is Caroline Berg Eriksen aka Fotballfrue a bad role model? Does she really encourage anorexia, and is she promoting an un-healthy lifestyle? There are people loving the low-carb, whilst others only see problems with it. Surely this would be the case of any diet there is. She says she’s working out 5-6 times a week, a number than might seem high at first look, but compared to the remaining hours of the week, maybe isn’t so bad?
Would we scream as loud about bikini picutres if she was bigger? If she wasn’t talking so much about exercise and diet? Wouldn’t it be worse if she was promoting a lifestyle filled with wearing out sofa after sofa, eating a ton of chips and not more exercise than getting up to use the rest room? Truth be told, I have never really liked her much. And I have been sceptical to what sometimes could come across as an obsessive way of life. But writing this down I have somewhat changed my mind. She has after all, at no point, told anyone else how to live their life. She is trying to live a healthy life in a fashion that suits both her and her husband. And more so, they are happy.
Surely it must be seen as a better role model being one that takes care of herself, than someone who’s at risk of a heart attack at 30? Just make sure it doesn’t take over your life Caroline, remember to enjoy yourself with the goods of life as well, which in all honesty it seems like you are; just have a look at this great recipe on her blog for Cakepops!
The Renso Diaries 